I hide from the headlamps, no lights in the window

Gotta love Fiat… took the barc in yesterday to have its headlights adjusted (amongst other things), and apparently it may still fail its NCT retest because there are fingerprints (not mine) on the inside of the glass that are causing the beam not to focus properly.

Just buy a new glass then? Ah no, Fiat will only sell you a sealed headlamp unit, for 300 euro…

On the Buses

Back in residence after my trip to Norn Iron with Julie. Took in all the usual touristy things, like the Giant’s Causeway (I’m sure in Scotland we were taught that it was Finn MacCool who ran away from Benandonner though!), the Tyrone Crystal factory, the Belfast bus tour and the traffic jams in Dundalk. (Okay, so Dundalk’s actually on this side of the border.)

Still not quite sure what to make of the fact that said bus tour includes the Shankill and Falls Road these days… the fact that open top buses can now freely parade around (perhaps not the best choice of phrase) interface areas is a sign of remarkable progress, and our ironically-monikered tourguide Billy’s irreverence towards the tricoloured-kerbstones, murals and army observation points would probably have seen his kneecaps in some danger not so many years ago.

But the 12th of July bonfires were still being readied, and I don’t suppose we’ll hear any fewer poisonous party songs at the next Old Firm game.

Eugenia on JDS2

So, it seems Eugenia didn’t like JDS2 much. But considering it’s never been touted as anything other than JDS1 plus system management tools, and it’s still aimed squarely at the likes of tightly-administered banks and call centres, I’d have been more concerned if the review hadn’t been padded out with some stuff about the games
not working properly.

Sure JDS has bugs, and I’d be the first to admit that some of them aren’t too hard to find if you’re not one of our target users (and Eugenia knows exactly who they are). But at the end of the day I’d rather that Sun continues to fix them based on customers’ rather than journalists’ priorities, even if the odd predictably-unflattering
review ensues.

Quids In

Off to Belfast in the morning for a long weekend. Despite having grown up with pounds and pence in Scotland, digging some out for the short trip up the road from Dublin has made me realise just how old-fashioned they look nowadays.

Private Joke

Apparently our new Sun Ireland intranet site no longer allows us to see all our local colleagues’ mugshots, because doing so constitutes a “privacy issue”. I wonder if they’ll be taking down all our cubicle name plates too, in case we accidentally go round to somebody’s desk and see their face.

Contrasting Fortunes

Have spent most of today hacking away at gnome-themes again, trying to fill in the holes that our accessible themes currently leave on the development branch of JDS. If GNOME is serious about accessibility, ‘provision of a high contrast application icon’ really should be a mimimum integration criterion.

Will be spending the rest of the afternoon sticking my oar into the FTP login and Connect to
Server dialogs again, though, which should be more fun :)